I disagree. Techniques for spreading rationality are highly rational to learn. Considering subjects such as Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate I dare say that it’s almost essential for the project of disseminating rationality that LessWrong as a group learns how group dynamics work and how successful communities are built. If we consider being rational a good thing then we ought to make it as attractive as possible to feel as part of the rationalist group.
Strong agreement with your disagreement. I just finished Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and observe that rationalists seem to gravitate towards a liberal, individualistic moral foundation, while the rest seem to automatically balance that with, or favor, group binding moral foundations. Thus, we rationalists (and liberals in general) are seen as immoral because of our tendency to disregard others’ crucial moral foundations of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. Thus, this has never been a disagreement over facts at all, but rather, a moral loathing of our very kind.
rationalists seem to gravitate towards a liberal, individualistic moral foundation, while the rest seem to automatically balance that with, or favor, group binding moral foundations
Unfortunately, once this effect becomes known, it is further exaggerated for signalling purposes. Reversing stupidity is not intelligence, but it is frequently used to signal intelligence or independence.
If most people agree with any group opinion, then I shall signal my intellectual superiority by disagreeing with the group even when the group suggests something useful (a smart person is able to find some error or at least an analogy with some error everywhere). If I agree with someone at 99%, it is an opportunity to gain karma points by pointing out the 1% of difference, even if the cost is ruining a good idea and starting a pattern of mutual defection (next time when I come with an idea the other person agrees at 99% and disagrees with 1%, what is the chance they would support me: epsilon? great, so now instead of two successful projects we have two failed plans).
Thus, we rationalists (and liberals in general) are seen as immoral because of our tendency to disregard others’ crucial moral foundations of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. Thus, this has never been a disagreement over facts at all, but rather, a moral loathing of our very kind.
I guess even greater loathing is at the inability for cooperation and loyalty and basically efficient following of any values in general.
People with other moral foundations and loyalty to other groups can be percieved, in evolutionary terms, as enemies. But people with no moral foundations, no loyalty, no ability to cooperate, are simply… worthless. They are at the bottom of the pecking order. They are annoying, a waste of resources. With a reasonable enemy, you can sometimes have a truce, a cooperation based on game-theoretical mutual advantage. With a person who defects habitually, you can’t have even this.
If someone suggests: “let’s dance together, because it’s (scientifically proved to be) fun” is it really a rational thing to say: “no, that would be like Hitler or something”? Because some comments seem like a diplomatic way to express this.
On a more meta level: Perhaps human brains work differently in a “thinking mode” and “doing mode”. What helps you in one mode, may harm you in the other mode. Independent thinking is good for the thinking mode. (And even this has limits! You should study science instead of reinventing the wheel.) But in doing mode, ambition to do everything alone is detrimental. (Again, it depends. Some things are OK to be done by one person. But other things are too big for this. Yet other things are somewhere between; they can possibly be done by one person, but doing them by group is far more efficient.) It is good to rationally decide whether to join a group or not. It is also good to sometimes review this decision, alone. However if the group is supposed to ever do anything, we can’t all stay 24 hours a day in the paranoid mindset. No, it does not make us more rational, it just makes us losers, and in long-term it leads to sour-grapes philosophy about how the world is biased against intelligent people.
Thus, this has never been a disagreement over facts at all, but rather, a moral loathing of our very kind.
This sounds unnecessarily hyperbolic. On what grounds do you claim that this difference causes ‘loathing’ often enough for it to be termed generally as such?
I think the dislike is visceral, coming from the same place that makes incest feel icky. Haidt’s research seems to show people feel moral conclusions first, then rationalize them. I think it possible that a fairly large percentage of conservatives experience an intense visceral disgust for any blatant disregard of group binding moral foundations.
But my conclusion from that is not that conservatives should be vilified; just that we need to understand that the issue of group—vs- individual moral emphasis is a lot more than just a friendly disagreement over facts. The OP is making the point that we need to take group-binding dynamics seriously, both in understanding and using them to our advantage.
I’m definitely a “liberal” (among other things), but I’m by no means excluding group values and group interests from my ethics. I see the question of individual rights vs group-ism, cooperation, etc as a 90% false dichotomy of the worst and most damaging kind. Liberals are silly and near-sighted enough for letting this shit go on, but hard-line conservatives are arguably even worse (and more guilty) for stirring up the hostility and moving the focus from entirely solvable, compromise-accepting practical issues (e.g. abortion) to some metaphysical conflict of responsibility vs selfishness.
I do not deny the essentially adversarial nature of differing values’ and attitudes’ interaction in society, but it doesn’t mean we should escalate the inevitable debate to an all-out war.
(Sorry for blatant meta-politics, but I’m trying to call out mind-killing here, not increase it.)
(Sorry for blatant meta-politics, but I’m trying to call out mind-killing here, not increase it.)
I do kind of agree that the statement was mindkilling because it was (and this is pretty ironic considering its content) rather tribal in nature. At the very least I pretty much felt excluded from the intended audience.
Hey, dude, I’m 100% cool with what you are saying! My criticism relates to those benighted heathens who engage in mainstream political debate, and not to anyone who has joined the wise and glorious LW community and adopted our enlightened ways!
The dichotomies are always rationally solvable, but we are hardwired to loathe compromise on moral issues.
I think it is possible to interpret my comment is saying something bad about conservatives and good about liberals. However, what I wanted, rather, was to make the point that we (as liberals or liberal rationalists) need to think about taking group binding moral foundations as seriously as conservatives do, because if we dismiss them as outdated evolutionary vestige, that will definitely not solve social and political polarization (which in the US, at least, is at record levels).
What “taking seriously” should mean I’m not completely sure. But I think it starts at understanding and using what is known to work while attempting to avoid the known pitfalls (much like the OP suggests). And as this comment thread demonstrates, that seems to be a bit of a tightrope.
While some of that may be true, it may well be that the solution is to get other’s to adopt a morality that has less emphasis on ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. It may be possible to hijack them somewhat (transferring respect for authority to respect for subject matter experts who have a history of making correct predictions, and transferring purity to a distaste for poor reasoning), but to a large extent these moral inclinations are part of the problem, not a solution. Ingroup loyalty is why politics are the mindkiller and why many wars and similar events occur. That said, I think your point may have a core of truth, and I’ve upvoted your remark.
While some of that may be true, it may well be that the solution is to get other’s to adopt a morality that has less emphasis on ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity
The trouble is, these things are indispensable for any large-scale (and possibly even small-scale) cooperation and coordination between people. Of course, it’s possible to masquerade them, but it’s always easy to see them in operation among the kinds of people who loudly deny them and insist they’re bad. In particular, this certainly holds for the modern intellectual elites, and it’s particularly notable in Haidt’s own evident (though likely not intentional) bias in the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.
Now, when making this point, it’s always tempting to engage in an attack on this blindness and hypocrisy, but at the same time, we are lucky that they exist. An actual disappearance of loyalty, authority, and sanctity in the moral calculus of people would mean literally the end of organized society, so we’re certainly much better off if they’re negated only in a false and hypocritical way than if they were truly absent.
Haidt’s own evident (though likely not intentional) rigging of the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.
Can you expand on this? I’ve thought for a while that he underemphasizes purity/sacredness on the left (in particular that he essentially ignores things like caring about organic food or vegetarianism which fit classic food taboo forms) but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that looked like rigging in his studies.
“Rigged” was a bad choice of word on my part, since it suggests intentional manipulation, and as I’ve already written, I’m not suggesting anything like that in Haidt’s case. Rather, it’s a matter of deeply internalized biases. More specifically, the problem is that with enough motivation, almost anything can be rationalized in terms of harm and fairness, and people whose favored ideology emphasizes these elements are likely to invent such rationalizations for their own specific norms of purity, sacredness, group loyalty, and authority. Haidt’s approach ends up heavily biased because it correctly recognizes these latter elements in those cases where they are more or less explicit (which happen to be mostly on the political right), while at the same time failing to uncover them when they exist under a veneer of rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness.
Now, the concrete examples of leftist purity manifested in nutritionist and environmentalist ways are recognized by Haidt, as another commenter has already noted. (Though, in my opinion, he is certainly biased in underplaying their overall importance.) However, I believe there are other examples that illustrate the problem even better.
Take for example the norms about sexual matters. One puzzle I’ve always found fascinating is why, for modern liberals, support for laissez-faire in matters of sex is so strikingly correlated with opposition to laissez-faire in economic matters and support for paternalistic government regulation in pretty much everything else. After all, most of the standard arguments of liberals against economic laissez-faire and in favor of government paternalism hold just as well for sexual matters. (Arguably, they are even stronger in the latter case—just consider how much it involves in terms of zero- and negative-sum games, tremendous inequalities, common patterns of irrational behavior, health concerns, discrimination across protected categories, etc., etc.) Yet an attempt to apply these arguments to sex immediately triggers a strong negative reaction that can’t be justified by any reasonable argument based on harm or fairness.
From this, it seems pretty clear that modern liberalism incorporates a strong element of sacredness associated with individual autonomy in matters of sex. This, of course, is nothing very surprising, considering that strong norms of sacredness regulating sex are a human universal. Yet even if he had a perfectly unbiased view of the matter, how could Haidt possibly reveal this element in his questionnaires without violating the associated norms of sacredness as they apply to the public discourse about sex-related topics?
Another fascinating topic is the peculiar way in which in-group morality is commonly manifested on the left. What I have in mind is the phenomenon that was discussed recently on LW in a thread about Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism,” which Orwell termed “transferred nationalism.” See this subthread, in which I made some points whose relevance in this context should be clear. Again, this is something highly relevant in the real world, whose discussion however requires much more subtlety and de-biasing than anything within the reach of Haidt’s questionnaires.
I’d like to elaborate on some examples of authority norms that are common on the left too, but right now I’m short on time. I’ll get back to it if this thread remains active in the next few days.
(in particular that he essentially ignores things like caring about organic food or vegetarianism which fit classic food taboo forms)
He does mention those. E.g. The Righteous Mind, page 254:
The Sanctity foundation is used most heavily by the
religious right, but it is also used on the spiritual left. You
can see the foundation’s original impurity-avoidance
function in New Age grocery stores, where you’ll find a
variety of products that promise to cleanse you of “toxins.”
And you’ll find the Sanctity foundation underlying some of
the moral passions of the environmental movement. Many
environmentalists revile industrialism, capitalism, and
automobiles not just for the physical pollution they create
but also for a more symbolic kind of pollution—a
degradation of nature, and of humanity’s original nature,
before it was corrupted by industrial capitalism.
I’ve seen both of those before. They don’t answer the issue in question which concerns Haidt’s studies being rigged. Whether there’s other evidence in the same direction is a distinct question.
It’s rigged in the sense that his “sacredness/purity” questions are about things conservatives tend to consider pure/sacred and not about the things liberals consider pure/sacred. Similarly, for his loyalty and authority questions. Furthermore, a large part of the identity of modern liberals (especially non-hippie liberals in the case of sacredness) is that they’re above such old fashioned things as tribalism, superstition, and blind obedience thus they tend to have a blind spot for the places where they engage in these things.
True this rigging wasn’t intetional on Haidt’s part, but then Vladimir said as much.
Similarly, for his loyalty and authority questions. Furthermore, a large part of the identity of modern liberals (especially non-hippie liberals in the case of sacredness) is that they’re above such old fashioned things as tribalism, superstition, and blind obedience thus they tend to have a blind spot for the places where they engage in these things.
I agree that this is a really acute and progress-blocking problem for liberals (some more radical leftists, e.g. Zizek, are at least more reflexive about these things). However, as I was saying before, what really unnerves me is the alt-right variant of this very meme, which is, if possible, even more proud and blinded. Just see any typical blogging fan of Moldbug, especially one talking about pragmatism, “ideology-free” approaches to social studies, Austrian economics and such. That’s the vibe I get from this crowd.
Also, it’s the key reason for my tolerance of mainstream conservatism despite my numerous disagreements with it, as IMO it scores better than the alternatives on this problem.
This isn’t evidence of rigging as such, but I should note that some of my psychologist friends are rather skeptical about the methodology of Moral Foundations Theory. E.g. in his 2009 paper, Haidt reports the Cronbach’s alphas for the three MFT studies:
Study 1 [...] Cronbach’s alphas for the three-item measures of each foundation were .62 (Harm), .67 (Fairness), .59 (Ingroup), .39 (Authority), and .70 (Purity).
Study 2 [...] Cronbach’s alphas for each foundation were .71 (Harm), .70 (Fairness), .71 (Ingroup), .64 (Authority), and .76 (Purity).”
Study 3 [...] Cronbach’s alphas for each foundation were .69 (Harm), .69 (Fairness), .69 (Ingroup), .67 (Authority), and .58 (Purity).
I’m no expert in statistics myself, but I’m told that an alpha of .70 indicates a measure for which half of the result is just noise/error and half something real, while alphas of less than .7 are composed more of noise than anything else. As can be seen in the above numbers, Haidt’s measures occasionally reach that minimum level, but more frequently (at least in that paper) they don’t. Which implies that the MFT questions may not really be measuring what Haidt thinks they’re measuring.
(Still, many of Haidt’s claims seem intuitively right, so I’m inclined to believe that he’s roughly on the right track.)
(Here is Haidt’s response, which I find rather unconvincing.)
In fact, the more I think about Haidt’s questions, the more heavily biased they seem. For example, one of his “authority” questions asks for how much money you’d curse your parents in their face, and have to wait for a year to explain and apologize. Imagine if he instead asked for how much money you’d yell racial insults at a black person. Now, Haidt would presumably say that the latter falls properly under “harm,” since it would be greatly emotionally hurtful to this person. But how does this same argument not apply to someone being cursed by their own child?!
Totally eliminating group identification precludes most forms of cooperation (or at least makes them very much more difficult), but supporting a group identity isn’t quite the same thing as making that identity a central part of your personal identity. The latter is demonstrably dangerous (to the group as well as the individual) for all that it’s usually an effective way to get things done.
Now, when making this point, it’s always tempting to engage in an attack on this blindness and hypocrisy, but at the same time, we are lucky that they exist. An actual disappearance of loyalty, authority, and sanctity in the moral calculus of people would mean literally the end of organized society, so we’re certainly much better off if they’re negated only in a false and hypocritical way than if they were truly absent.
Please keep in mind that what allows much of the hypocrisy and denial in this area is that alternate “definitions” or “variants” of loyalty and authority that are closer to the liberal rather than conservative mindset (“liberal sancity” is at least called out sometimes, like below) are so poorly explored and accepted at this time. And yes, that’s the liberal theorists’ job.
For example, we’ve got some practical evidence that decentralized “authority” systems built on rational respect, voluntary trust or affection can work, overcoming challenges—from anarcho-syndicalist experiments to today’s crowdsourcing projects. Yet most societies still stick to the old farmer-type ways in this regard, and still the very word carries the connotations of “conservatism”, “inflexibility”, “tradition”, (I’m not saying those are automatically bad, just one-sided) while the term should really be accepted for any such social function that’s any good for maintaining peace and sustainability. The same goes for other value categories.
When I took that test, I gave answers consistent with what he described as the liberal pattern; I saw what you called the group-binding moral foundations as means to ends, not as ends in themselves, so I answered accordingly. Loyalty and respect are usually good things, but the loyalty of a soldier bravely fighting for the wrong side isn’t moral.
I disagree. Techniques for spreading rationality are highly rational to learn. Considering subjects such as Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate I dare say that it’s almost essential for the project of disseminating rationality that LessWrong as a group learns how group dynamics work and how successful communities are built. If we consider being rational a good thing then we ought to make it as attractive as possible to feel as part of the rationalist group.
Strong agreement with your disagreement. I just finished Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and observe that rationalists seem to gravitate towards a liberal, individualistic moral foundation, while the rest seem to automatically balance that with, or favor, group binding moral foundations. Thus, we rationalists (and liberals in general) are seen as immoral because of our tendency to disregard others’ crucial moral foundations of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. Thus, this has never been a disagreement over facts at all, but rather, a moral loathing of our very kind.
Unfortunately, once this effect becomes known, it is further exaggerated for signalling purposes. Reversing stupidity is not intelligence, but it is frequently used to signal intelligence or independence.
If most people agree with any group opinion, then I shall signal my intellectual superiority by disagreeing with the group even when the group suggests something useful (a smart person is able to find some error or at least an analogy with some error everywhere). If I agree with someone at 99%, it is an opportunity to gain karma points by pointing out the 1% of difference, even if the cost is ruining a good idea and starting a pattern of mutual defection (next time when I come with an idea the other person agrees at 99% and disagrees with 1%, what is the chance they would support me: epsilon? great, so now instead of two successful projects we have two failed plans).
I guess even greater loathing is at the inability for cooperation and loyalty and basically efficient following of any values in general.
People with other moral foundations and loyalty to other groups can be percieved, in evolutionary terms, as enemies. But people with no moral foundations, no loyalty, no ability to cooperate, are simply… worthless. They are at the bottom of the pecking order. They are annoying, a waste of resources. With a reasonable enemy, you can sometimes have a truce, a cooperation based on game-theoretical mutual advantage. With a person who defects habitually, you can’t have even this.
If someone suggests: “let’s dance together, because it’s (scientifically proved to be) fun” is it really a rational thing to say: “no, that would be like Hitler or something”? Because some comments seem like a diplomatic way to express this.
On a more meta level: Perhaps human brains work differently in a “thinking mode” and “doing mode”. What helps you in one mode, may harm you in the other mode. Independent thinking is good for the thinking mode. (And even this has limits! You should study science instead of reinventing the wheel.) But in doing mode, ambition to do everything alone is detrimental. (Again, it depends. Some things are OK to be done by one person. But other things are too big for this. Yet other things are somewhere between; they can possibly be done by one person, but doing them by group is far more efficient.) It is good to rationally decide whether to join a group or not. It is also good to sometimes review this decision, alone. However if the group is supposed to ever do anything, we can’t all stay 24 hours a day in the paranoid mindset. No, it does not make us more rational, it just makes us losers, and in long-term it leads to sour-grapes philosophy about how the world is biased against intelligent people.
This sounds unnecessarily hyperbolic. On what grounds do you claim that this difference causes ‘loathing’ often enough for it to be termed generally as such?
I think the dislike is visceral, coming from the same place that makes incest feel icky. Haidt’s research seems to show people feel moral conclusions first, then rationalize them. I think it possible that a fairly large percentage of conservatives experience an intense visceral disgust for any blatant disregard of group binding moral foundations.
But my conclusion from that is not that conservatives should be vilified; just that we need to understand that the issue of group—vs- individual moral emphasis is a lot more than just a friendly disagreement over facts. The OP is making the point that we need to take group-binding dynamics seriously, both in understanding and using them to our advantage.
I’m definitely a “liberal” (among other things), but I’m by no means excluding group values and group interests from my ethics. I see the question of individual rights vs group-ism, cooperation, etc as a 90% false dichotomy of the worst and most damaging kind. Liberals are silly and near-sighted enough for letting this shit go on, but hard-line conservatives are arguably even worse (and more guilty) for stirring up the hostility and moving the focus from entirely solvable, compromise-accepting practical issues (e.g. abortion) to some metaphysical conflict of responsibility vs selfishness.
I do not deny the essentially adversarial nature of differing values’ and attitudes’ interaction in society, but it doesn’t mean we should escalate the inevitable debate to an all-out war.
(Sorry for blatant meta-politics, but I’m trying to call out mind-killing here, not increase it.)
I do kind of agree that the statement was mindkilling because it was (and this is pretty ironic considering its content) rather tribal in nature. At the very least I pretty much felt excluded from the intended audience.
Hey, dude, I’m 100% cool with what you are saying! My criticism relates to those benighted heathens who engage in mainstream political debate, and not to anyone who has joined the wise and glorious LW community and adopted our enlightened ways!
;)
The funny thing is that this actually makes it better.
The dichotomies are always rationally solvable, but we are hardwired to loathe compromise on moral issues.
I think it is possible to interpret my comment is saying something bad about conservatives and good about liberals. However, what I wanted, rather, was to make the point that we (as liberals or liberal rationalists) need to think about taking group binding moral foundations as seriously as conservatives do, because if we dismiss them as outdated evolutionary vestige, that will definitely not solve social and political polarization (which in the US, at least, is at record levels).
What “taking seriously” should mean I’m not completely sure. But I think it starts at understanding and using what is known to work while attempting to avoid the known pitfalls (much like the OP suggests). And as this comment thread demonstrates, that seems to be a bit of a tightrope.
While some of that may be true, it may well be that the solution is to get other’s to adopt a morality that has less emphasis on ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. It may be possible to hijack them somewhat (transferring respect for authority to respect for subject matter experts who have a history of making correct predictions, and transferring purity to a distaste for poor reasoning), but to a large extent these moral inclinations are part of the problem, not a solution. Ingroup loyalty is why politics are the mindkiller and why many wars and similar events occur. That said, I think your point may have a core of truth, and I’ve upvoted your remark.
The trouble is, these things are indispensable for any large-scale (and possibly even small-scale) cooperation and coordination between people. Of course, it’s possible to masquerade them, but it’s always easy to see them in operation among the kinds of people who loudly deny them and insist they’re bad. In particular, this certainly holds for the modern intellectual elites, and it’s particularly notable in Haidt’s own evident (though likely not intentional) bias in the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.
Now, when making this point, it’s always tempting to engage in an attack on this blindness and hypocrisy, but at the same time, we are lucky that they exist. An actual disappearance of loyalty, authority, and sanctity in the moral calculus of people would mean literally the end of organized society, so we’re certainly much better off if they’re negated only in a false and hypocritical way than if they were truly absent.
Can you expand on this? I’ve thought for a while that he underemphasizes purity/sacredness on the left (in particular that he essentially ignores things like caring about organic food or vegetarianism which fit classic food taboo forms) but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that looked like rigging in his studies.
“Rigged” was a bad choice of word on my part, since it suggests intentional manipulation, and as I’ve already written, I’m not suggesting anything like that in Haidt’s case. Rather, it’s a matter of deeply internalized biases. More specifically, the problem is that with enough motivation, almost anything can be rationalized in terms of harm and fairness, and people whose favored ideology emphasizes these elements are likely to invent such rationalizations for their own specific norms of purity, sacredness, group loyalty, and authority. Haidt’s approach ends up heavily biased because it correctly recognizes these latter elements in those cases where they are more or less explicit (which happen to be mostly on the political right), while at the same time failing to uncover them when they exist under a veneer of rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness.
Now, the concrete examples of leftist purity manifested in nutritionist and environmentalist ways are recognized by Haidt, as another commenter has already noted. (Though, in my opinion, he is certainly biased in underplaying their overall importance.) However, I believe there are other examples that illustrate the problem even better.
Take for example the norms about sexual matters. One puzzle I’ve always found fascinating is why, for modern liberals, support for laissez-faire in matters of sex is so strikingly correlated with opposition to laissez-faire in economic matters and support for paternalistic government regulation in pretty much everything else. After all, most of the standard arguments of liberals against economic laissez-faire and in favor of government paternalism hold just as well for sexual matters. (Arguably, they are even stronger in the latter case—just consider how much it involves in terms of zero- and negative-sum games, tremendous inequalities, common patterns of irrational behavior, health concerns, discrimination across protected categories, etc., etc.) Yet an attempt to apply these arguments to sex immediately triggers a strong negative reaction that can’t be justified by any reasonable argument based on harm or fairness.
From this, it seems pretty clear that modern liberalism incorporates a strong element of sacredness associated with individual autonomy in matters of sex. This, of course, is nothing very surprising, considering that strong norms of sacredness regulating sex are a human universal. Yet even if he had a perfectly unbiased view of the matter, how could Haidt possibly reveal this element in his questionnaires without violating the associated norms of sacredness as they apply to the public discourse about sex-related topics?
Another fascinating topic is the peculiar way in which in-group morality is commonly manifested on the left. What I have in mind is the phenomenon that was discussed recently on LW in a thread about Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism,” which Orwell termed “transferred nationalism.” See this subthread, in which I made some points whose relevance in this context should be clear. Again, this is something highly relevant in the real world, whose discussion however requires much more subtlety and de-biasing than anything within the reach of Haidt’s questionnaires.
I’d like to elaborate on some examples of authority norms that are common on the left too, but right now I’m short on time. I’ll get back to it if this thread remains active in the next few days.
I’m definitely interested in what you want to say on the subject.
It looks to me as though a lot of people internalize age of consent laws as sacred.
More generally, does Haidt address sacredness in re patriotism and/or law-abidingness?
He does mention those. E.g. The Righteous Mind, page 254:
Here is a decent description of the liberal version of tribalism/loyality. You can also get more details in the article Konkvistador excerpts.
I’ve seen both of those before. They don’t answer the issue in question which concerns Haidt’s studies being rigged. Whether there’s other evidence in the same direction is a distinct question.
It’s rigged in the sense that his “sacredness/purity” questions are about things conservatives tend to consider pure/sacred and not about the things liberals consider pure/sacred. Similarly, for his loyalty and authority questions. Furthermore, a large part of the identity of modern liberals (especially non-hippie liberals in the case of sacredness) is that they’re above such old fashioned things as tribalism, superstition, and blind obedience thus they tend to have a blind spot for the places where they engage in these things.
True this rigging wasn’t intetional on Haidt’s part, but then Vladimir said as much.
I agree that this is a really acute and progress-blocking problem for liberals (some more radical leftists, e.g. Zizek, are at least more reflexive about these things). However, as I was saying before, what really unnerves me is the alt-right variant of this very meme, which is, if possible, even more proud and blinded. Just see any typical blogging fan of Moldbug, especially one talking about pragmatism, “ideology-free” approaches to social studies, Austrian economics and such. That’s the vibe I get from this crowd.
Also, it’s the key reason for my tolerance of mainstream conservatism despite my numerous disagreements with it, as IMO it scores better than the alternatives on this problem.
This isn’t evidence of rigging as such, but I should note that some of my psychologist friends are rather skeptical about the methodology of Moral Foundations Theory. E.g. in his 2009 paper, Haidt reports the Cronbach’s alphas for the three MFT studies:
I’m no expert in statistics myself, but I’m told that an alpha of .70 indicates a measure for which half of the result is just noise/error and half something real, while alphas of less than .7 are composed more of noise than anything else. As can be seen in the above numbers, Haidt’s measures occasionally reach that minimum level, but more frequently (at least in that paper) they don’t. Which implies that the MFT questions may not really be measuring what Haidt thinks they’re measuring.
(Still, many of Haidt’s claims seem intuitively right, so I’m inclined to believe that he’s roughly on the right track.)
Looking again at the questions listed in this paper, I remembered a blog post by Bryan Caplan in which he proposed some skillfully thought up alternative questions that make Haidt’s biases especially apparent:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/03/do_liberals_use.html
(Here is Haidt’s response, which I find rather unconvincing.)
In fact, the more I think about Haidt’s questions, the more heavily biased they seem. For example, one of his “authority” questions asks for how much money you’d curse your parents in their face, and have to wait for a year to explain and apologize. Imagine if he instead asked for how much money you’d yell racial insults at a black person. Now, Haidt would presumably say that the latter falls properly under “harm,” since it would be greatly emotionally hurtful to this person. But how does this same argument not apply to someone being cursed by their own child?!
Totally eliminating group identification precludes most forms of cooperation (or at least makes them very much more difficult), but supporting a group identity isn’t quite the same thing as making that identity a central part of your personal identity. The latter is demonstrably dangerous (to the group as well as the individual) for all that it’s usually an effective way to get things done.
Do you disagree?
Please keep in mind that what allows much of the hypocrisy and denial in this area is that alternate “definitions” or “variants” of loyalty and authority that are closer to the liberal rather than conservative mindset (“liberal sancity” is at least called out sometimes, like below) are so poorly explored and accepted at this time. And yes, that’s the liberal theorists’ job.
For example, we’ve got some practical evidence that decentralized “authority” systems built on rational respect, voluntary trust or affection can work, overcoming challenges—from anarcho-syndicalist experiments to today’s crowdsourcing projects. Yet most societies still stick to the old farmer-type ways in this regard, and still the very word carries the connotations of “conservatism”, “inflexibility”, “tradition”, (I’m not saying those are automatically bad, just one-sided) while the term should really be accepted for any such social function that’s any good for maintaining peace and sustainability. The same goes for other value categories.
Trivia note: I found some of those papers via the references in The Righteous Mind.
When I took that test, I gave answers consistent with what he described as the liberal pattern; I saw what you called the group-binding moral foundations as means to ends, not as ends in themselves, so I answered accordingly. Loyalty and respect are usually good things, but the loyalty of a soldier bravely fighting for the wrong side isn’t moral.